Soul's Code

Even something as materialistic as an MP3 player can help us connect and communicate with the universe

GUEST COLUMN: AMY LEASK — When I bought my iPod, it was with great chagrin. I was teaching at the time, and I competed with the little electronic beasts for my students’ attention on a daily basis. I did the “pull out your earphones” gesture about as often as I turned a page.

I wanted one to keep myself alert, as well as relaxed, while slogging through my very large pile of grading. It worked; within weeks I was so smitten with my new toy I purchased a colorful sticker to disguise its bland, silver exterior and hungrily downloaded anything funky enough to capture my interest.

As The Vatican, the American Public and Republican Christians remain divided on Ted Kennedy’s “State of Grace” and “very Catholic Funeral”, US scholars debate new ways to communicate with, or ex-communicate, God. Soul’s Code highlights the great divide!

Where Americans disagree: “Kennedy funeral rings with hope, Twitter with vitriol”

Edward Moore Kennedy wrote to the Pope: “I’ve never failed to believe”

More than a soft-core brand: Paris Hilton does have a soul — and a kind mind

According to the spiritual teacher and modern-day mystic, Eckhart Tolle, Michael Jackson was not a successful entertainer so much for his technical virtuosity. Instead, Jackson made a connection with gazillions of people because he was a portal into consciousness and presence. A quote from a rare Tolle lecture, Living a Life of Inner Peace:

You’ll probably laugh but I saw Michael Jackson on TV the other day. Even if you say that he’s strange, he’s weird  — that’s what people say — the moment he goes into the music mode, something takes over. Woosh. Wow. What was that? He actually said that you can’t think, it doesn’t come from thinking. You can learn the externals but not the essence. So the moment he switches into music notes, an energy takes over. It’s beautiful.

Despite his transgressions,  Edward Kennedy was a model of grace and forgiveness. His legacy outshone Chappaquidick and the shadows cast by assassins Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan

BY PAUL KAIHLA — In our anxious world the news of a Kennedy death has an archetypal effect: shock and awe, a collective “pain body” experience. John F, ’63; Robert F. K. in LA in ’68, by the first post-war Arab terrorist in America.

But this time, there was no “Kennedy curse.”

Let’s celebrate that Teddy, who ran for president like his brothers, died of natural causes — not an assassin’s bullet or bomb. Let the mainstream media call him an American icon. Or conflicted whatever.

Soul’s Code calls him a person who took a leap of faith. He didn’t retreat into wealth, like Jackie. He didn’t become Jackie’s lover, like Bobbie. He cathected in not only his uncle-role with his family and tribe, but in a larger role with our global village. He worked his (energetic) anatomy 0ff to change the world:

Family man, related: Most American men somehow, find some way, to be at odds with their mothers. Please find an instance in a book, or in a newspaper, or a YouTube rip where Ted ever said a single negative word about his mother.

An Episcopal priest and pagan witch see eye-to-eye on karma, the power of forgiveness and Scotland’s controversial release of the Pan Am 103 convict

DANNY KENNY and DAVID RICKEY — When Pan Am flight 103 was ripped from the skies on December 21st, 1988, it shocked the world and tore a remote tiny Scottish community apart. This horrific act of terror killed 270 people, including eleven in Lockerbie, as large sections of the plane fell in and around the town.

A BOOMER LOVE STORY: Woodstock poster couple *still* together, happily married . . .

When dinosaur media properties fight for life in an industry depression and macro recession, they invade whose turf?

Love, loss, realization, sex and “sin” are some of the life highs and lows that provoke spiritual exploration in the first place, and are among the core themes to which Soul’s Code is devoted.

We are amused when Old Media tries to juice summer newsstands sales by doing what we do best.

TIME’s attempt: “An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness, as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault.”

Wow, what (an original) concept.  Think Ann Coulter said it first. In 1860.

A San Francisco-based independent film documents an ex-addict’s journey to his own soul’s code

GUEST COLUMN: DANNY KENNY — Some people are born Frank and some people learn to be Frank, but in the new film “May I be Frank?” no one can ever really be Frank except, well, Frank. Earnest, characterized as someone with a firm, humorless, and sincere belief in the validity of his own opinion is, thankfully, nowhere to be found in this flick. If you are, however, thinking flashy Italian American who does things his own way, you’re on the right track. But this is ultimately a story about a man in search of his voice and a different kind of love, perhaps the most elusive . . . self love.

In Great Britain, the disaffected, heroin-addicted young men immortalized in Irvine Welsh’s seminal novel, Trainspotting, are now middle-aged. And, it emerged this week, they are dying before their time. (The Guardian)

The high cost of cocaine: For “Clare Shaw . . .  her career, her friends, her husband and even her daughter”.  (UK Daily Mail)

Primed for addiction: A new Northwestern University study smokes out temptation (New Scientist)